Beijing, entrepreneurial values

• Source: Global Times
• [22:05 October 22 2009]
• Comments

These locations are becoming familiar worldwide, and they will color our view of the Midwest and Silicon Valley.

Some of my Beijing colleagues were only one generation away from poverty, and this gave them the ability to extract maximum value from minimum resources.

Thousands of Lenovo retail stores in China used cellphone text messages to report daily inventory.

Lenovo's first building was a guardhouse hut about the size of Dave Packard's garage in Palo Alto, California, where he and Bill Hewlett jump-started Silicon Valley.

In a Lenovo building in Zhongguancun, where I worked, busy employees filled one-fourth of the marketing floor at 9 pm.

When Lenovo's only space for an Olympic technology showcase was smaller than its competitors, and defaced by an ugly ramp to an underground parking garage, my teammates turned lemons into spectacular lemonade.

They built a stage over the ramp and booked street performers who attracted large crowds. These crowds then formed long lines to view our technology exhibits.

Experiences like these changed the way I parent my four children. My view is shared not only by Friedman, whose book provides advice for parents about keeping their children globally competitive, but by investors who point to an economic future dominated by Asia.

In December 2007, the American investor Jim Rogers moved from New York to Singapore. In his book, A Gift to My Children, he says his most important investment is ensuring that his two daughters know Asia and learn Putonghua.

In the summer of 2008, my 18-year-old son Walker visited as we finalized Olympic preparations.

I armed him with a cheap cellphone, $20 worth of airtime, and money for transportation, and then turned him loose in Beijing with a friend he found on Facebook.

He navigated the city for 10 days and learned that he isn't just competing against other students at the University of North Carolina, where he is now a sophomore. He is competing against hustling students from China, India and South Korea, who are just as smart as he is, willing to work harder for less, and often hungrier.

The author is a communications consultant. He manages The Mercury Brief, www.mercurybrief. Com